The world of particle physics changed in 2012. Following decades of experimental searches and analysis, the scalar particle thought to be responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking, the Higgs boson, was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC at CERN. Now that we know of the existence and mass of the Higgs boson, […]
Bump or no bump
That was a question at the 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago
From 3rd August to 10th August the International Conference of High Energy Physics (ICHEP) took place at the Sheraton Hotel in the heart of the windy city. More than 1400 scientists, students and industrial representatives from all around the world were attending this major conference to present their research and discuss exciting results in High […]
What Is Basic Science Good For?
I spend a fair amount of time giving public lectures on particle physics and cosmology around the world. Quite often, I receive the same question from the audience, “what is this good for?” There is a wonderful movie titled Particle Fever, a documentary about the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider […]
More time for collaboration
DESY and KEK are two labs that have a lot in common. They know a lot about accelerators, operated and have operated a number of them in their long and eventful histories. They are their countries’ hubs for particle physics research, but they also run accelerators for photon science. They are national labs that collaborate […]
Adapting to change
The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) is a biannual gathering of the heads of major particle physics labs and institutes from around the world for the purpose of sharing news, liaising, and working together to promote global collaboration in our field. The Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC) has its mandate from ICFA, and the LC […]
LHC Run-2 results to point the way
Time passes, it seems, increasingly quickly and it’s now more than a month since the international Linear Collider Workshop, LCWS2015, took place in Whistler, British Columbia. This marked the latest milestone in our global community’s preparations for a next-generation high-energy linear electron-positron collider to explore (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld) the ‘known knowns’, namely the physics […]
ILC starts at 500 GeV and goes down in energy
ILC operation is still some years away, but physicists are already gearing up to find the optimal way to operate the ILC to harvest as much physics as we can. One of the great advantages of the ILC over circular machines is that the energy of the machine is tunable, and can also be upgraded […]
LHC is back in business
On 3 June, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN started delivering physics data for the first time in 27 months at the record energy of 13 TeV. This marks the start of season 2 at the LHC, opening the way to new discoveries. The LHC will now run round the clock for the next […]
Crossing technical and cultural borders
EU project E-JADE fosters exchange between European and Japanese researchers
Oskar Hartbrich is a PhD student who specialises in developing state-of-the art calorimeters for future ILC detectors. He is also a specialist for full detectors simulations, and he has just spent nine weeks in Japan getting even deeper into this role, sitting side by side with other experts from Tokyo and Shinshu universities to further […]
LHC commissioning continues in spite of obstacles
It is exciting to watch the LHC operations team slowly switch the machine back on step by step, encountering problems, solving them, encountering new ones and still breaking records while getting the machine running again. It is also educational. When the linear collider goes into operation it won’t be at the push of one button […]